Homecoming

Just like a high school football team, the girls returned to punt and tackle on home turf.

I still love Katie's. Even with the Wings of War fellowship that meets every Sunday morning for sermon and service on Katie's pool table.

Bloody Marys all around? Check.
Old drunk guy inquiring why there were no boys at the table? Check.
E's quick retort that "we're all lesbians" (mostly true)? Check.

I had my favorite, the Reuben. Lots of Russian dressing and sauerkraut- both of which I hate in normal life, but love on my Reuben. Go figure.

Katie O'Brien, you always treat me right.

Mock Crest, Redux

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, that part of our brunch team has a hard time spending time at Mock Crest. According to his credit card receipts, it was one of the last places our friend Kipp Crawford visited on November 9th 2009, the night he was killed. Police have speculated Kipp was attacked, robbed and left helpless in the street then killed when he was run over by a car.

Justice for Kipp would go a long way to healing the tremendous loss his death has caused for his loving family and numerous friends. Any tips can be shared anonymously at 503-823-HELP (4357).

Mock Crest Tavern, the Great Odyssey

When I tell people I’ve recently moved to the St. Johns district it elicits a near universal impulse to reassure me. “I heard it’s getting really cool.. up there” “I heard they’ve got some good.. uh.. restaurants?” “I went there once, it was.. nice! No really.. it’s great!” These are small, polite gestures of comfort with a subtext that scream, “You poor unfortunate soul, I hope you find some scrap of light or happiness living on that ice floe. I will hold your memory in my heart !”

Neighborhood agoraphobia is a pain anywhere you go, people hate riding to the subway from one part of New York to another, people hate riding the bus to a nether region of San Francisco and god help you if you ask someone in in the suburbs to venture further than a mile from their house. Despite the huge amount of time we spend commuting to work and errands, we’re all convinced commuting for fun, adventure or hangouts is a waste of time, life and resources. People in Portland are no exception, and what’s even more shocking about it here is that half the people here ride bikes -- it’s the flattest city I’ve ever seen. You can ride 10 miles and barely break a sweat all while having zoomed by hundreds of our fair city’s nooks, clubs and bars worth checking out.

So in the spirit of confronting one’s fears, whenever people make the offer to trek up out to my new ‘hood I’ll always take them up on it and try to make sure they have a good time. And one of my favorite places I’ve found since the great move north is the Mock Crest Tavern.

The first time I came here it was for a late night meeting with a (apparently!) lying liar who told me that in addition to having great drink specials, a gorgeous patio and a banging basket’o’tots, they also treated their AM crowd to a $1 breakfast special when you ordered a Bloody Mary. Ordering Bloody Marys? That’s where I’m a Viking!

I quickly notified my brunch partners that they better gas up their vehicles and chart a course north. Imagine my embarrassment to learn the legend of the $1 was a total myth. But despite the lack of uber-thrift, the Mock Crest’s breakfast is still an amazing fare. Their kitchen, built into the far side of the bar, is smaller than the desk I’m typing this from but they manage to churn out tasty, classic breakfast items. There are even some playful updates like a “MockMuffin” sandwich and a Pigs in a Blanket breakfast special that carried Christina and I back to fuzzy childhood memories.

That fuzziness might also be due to the libations. Served in a pint glass, heavy on the pour, totally spicy and served with celery, a pepperoncini (my favorite!) and an olive (gross! goes straight to Christina), Mock Crest has one of the best Bloodys we’ve found on this long, strange trip.

We also adored the mixed clientele of rowdy gentlemen on-hand for the golf tournament viewing (eager to help some distressed damsels with an uncooperative patio umbrella) to the hearty bike punx still holed up from the night before. But with every geographic-specific niche comes cliquishness. Most of us who travel by two wheels are closer to 30 than to high school but the old habit of forming a community out of snobbery never waned for some folks. Witness: the scowls and contempt evoked by the (fabulous) sparkly Huffy that I tool around town in. Now don’t get me wrong, my bike is totally a piece of shit by any standard. It’s heavy as a cow and over the years has cost more to maintain and repair than my car. But I bought it for $50, assembled it myself, have moved it cross country thus have grown very fond of it over the years. Not to mention, I’m certainly not going to take lessons on how to be cool from anyone who spends several hours a day with their butt-crack publicly exposed.

And since I was born ornery (and only ever got taller), I love to get a little confrontational with the haters. Not enough to cause an actual altercation (though with their little T-Rex arms that hardly seems menacing) but just enough to let them know their $2,000 bike and ONE LESS CAR t-shirt is not impressing anybody.

So when Christina and I, high on fluffy pancakes and punchy from cheap vodka, saw a dude futzing with his Schwinn near the same spot where I’d locked up my bike it was too much for me to resist, “Hey dude, don’t even try to bogart that Huffy. I’m watching you!” And then something really weird happened.. The Bike Punk laughed at my joke! NO, FOR REALS! CHRISTINA WAS THERE! Not only that, he totally chatted us up and was super-cute and sweet. OMG, righteousness FAIL! I give all credit to the awesome sense of community and redemption that can only be inspired by a solid neighborhood bar.

Thy drinkdom come.

Clearly, Portlanders worship the god of brunch. The devotees attending Sunday morning worship at Tin Shed this past weekend must have been so blissed out on the god of hot morning sunshine and endless coffee refills that they failed to care that they would be waiting up to an hour and a half for a table, and then another 45 minutes for food. Or, maybe like church, the devotees accept the long and boring bits in exchange for spiritual enlightenment, here in the form of bloody marys and sausage-gravy-soaked-biscuits. Fair enough, I'm willing to consider it.

Bloody Mary vs Virgin Mary, otherwise known as Tin Shed vs Church. The low-down.

TIN SHED: The bloody mary came in a pint glass, with tons of pickled veg. Spicy. Alcoholic. Served to me in my own glass, and NOT from a communal church chalice which will later result in a sore throat and mild flu-like symptoms because of the sniffling child ahead of me in the communion line-up.
CHURCH: I was raised Methodist, so we were served Safeway brand grape juice from concentrate. No wine. Although, I suspect that wine used for communion generally tends toward the economy version, with less attention paid to whether there are subtle notes of vanilla, cherry, and unicorn breath.

TIN SHED: Dogs are apparently allowed-- no, scratch that, ENCOURAGED at Tin Shed Sunday morning worship, as evidenced by the all the dogs lounging, sniffing, begging, and snarling underfoot.
CHURCH: Children seem to be the accessory of choice at most churches, rather than dogs. Sniffling children, especially.

TIN SHED: Eggs benedict (very, very good), crazy huge breakfast burritos (also very good), biscuits and gravy (the biscuits were light and doughy, the gravy was thick and meaty), and more. At reasonable prices.
CHURCH: Salads made from jello, whipped cream, and pistachios. Casseroles with tuna, some sort of unmemorable and/or unidentifiable cheese. Free if you stay for the evening program afterwards.

TIN SHED: You, sharing your table with your friends and/or family, and some delightful old guy in rainbow suspenders who came out to brunch alone.
CHURCH: You, sharing your pew with your family, and lots of old guys (the likelihood of rainbow suspenders is low). And more sniffling children.

TIN SHED: Delicious coffee. Served before, during, and after the worship service (by which I'm referring to your plate of food).
CHURCH: Coffee only if you stick around until the end of the service, and only after you shake hands with the pastor on your way out of the chapel. The quality of the coffee depends on whose turn it was to buy the beans that week.

TIN SHED: Facebook message circulating detailing the night manager's predilection for confusing all black patrons with gangbangers, then offering cookies as a reparations.

CHURCH: Institution-wide cover-ups to protect pedophiles whilst calling homosexuality "deviant behavior".

TIN SHED: Little in the way of soul salvation, but big in the way of soul food.
CHURCH: Possible grace, redemption, mercy, everlasting peace and other related states of being.

Um, so I think Tin Shed wins it for me this time, but I can't say I'm going to be a weekly follower of this particular Alberta street religion. I'm more of a once-a-year believer, like our polite neighbors to the north (Hi, Canada! Keep up the good work on maintaining your actual separation of church and state! We haven't been so good at that down here lately.) I'm just not good at organized religion, I guess.

LA sucks, wish you were here.

Last night I had a dream that I wore a silver sequin dress to a party. Arnold Schwarzenegger was there and upon seeing my glittery assets on display, he proposed to me. He had a lot of complicated rules about what our marriage would entail (mostly around the fact that he wanted to have sex with other people, a lot of other people) but I decided to go with it because I was curious about the idea of domestic adventure.

I think this is the lasting impact of my recent trip to Los Angeles on my subconscious.

I know it's a cliche to hate LA. There is nothing new to dryly observe or wittily complain about, plus you know, Joan Didion liked it well enough so what the fuck is my problem? But seriously, that place is a humid snakepit and every moment I spent breathing in its smoggy air and the undeserved self-importance of angry, anorexic bottom-feeders I could feel my soul being forever tarred.

It's not all Los Angeles's fault, I know. It was a work trip, work was going lousy (lousily?) and I knew I wouldn't get a chance to see any of my friends who live there (who all enjoy it and probably could've taught me a thing or two). When upon my return (the increasingly blog-shy) Nancy asked "are you going to move to Los Angeles now?" I felt like projectile vomit was not a strong enough response.

So when we ran into an old friend, a very talented artist from OlyWA (hi Kanako!) and her girlfriend (hi Emily!) who were also visiting, my work-wife and I found a free hour to go to The Griddle Cafe and talk about the miserable time we were all having. The final game of the World Cup was on and the place was packed with merriment and carb eaters (whoa!) We all admired whatever intrepid sense of invention came to create the "Black Magic" pancake dish (Oreos cooked inside of two giant flapjacks) but I'm not much a sugar-eater so I stuck with a chop salad and cheering for the Netherlands (le sigh). Kanako had some kind of apple-explosion pancakes that were gigantic and amazing.

According to their official site, MEGAN FOX is a fan, even though sometimes she wears a BIKINI (being a ho for the SEO!)

Having chatted up our lovely waitress whose girlfriend's film had just screened with Kanako's, she arrived at our table with a french press pot (nice) and two Bloody Marys (what!) announcing that there was some kind of special going on. I'm used to being the one at any given breakfast table who has the most vices, but this morning the divergence was pretty absurd. Between the four of us I'm the only one who drinks alcohol or caffeine..! Needless to say by the time I drank two Bloodys and a french pot of coffee I was in no shape for this:

Oh and did I mention it came with a block of cornbread that could've been used to cordon off an 8-lane freeway?

So thanks, Griddle, yours is, as Depeche Mode would say, a pain that I'm used to -- and a welcome relief from a city I find little to agree with.

UPDATE:
Sorry, forgot the reason why we're all here:
Yeah, those are romaine lettuce leafs in my SoCali Bloodys, wtf?

I'm gonna take you home to meet my mom.

Milo's City Cafe

Aw, Milo's.... you're the bloody my mom wants me to date. My mom does, in fact, love a good bloody mary- I'm certain I inherited my taste for the tomato & vodka drinkable breakfast salad from her. (Just don't tell her church ladies as much.) Erin and I found ourselves at Milo's after we ended things with Katie's, in an effort to try the other side- a clean, well-lit place with incredibly hot wait-staff, spot-on service, legendary benedicts and talk-of-the-town bloodys. All of what we'd heard came true at Milo's. Hot wait staff, fast service, perfect lemony-yellow hollandaise smothering my smoked salmon benny, and pretty delicious bloodys, even if they were on the weaker side.

But.... there's always a but. Perhaps it was the drinking I had done the night before. Perhaps it was the impromptu lesbian relationship counseling we (Erin and I- the two straight girls, mind you) administered to the friend we'd brought along on our Milo's speed date, maybe it was the throngs of breeding Portlanders and their criminally beautiful children inside the diner... but the fact of it is that Milo's is never going to be our weekly spot. You can't linger in a place where there is a line-up at the front door stretching around the block, all the hungry beady eyes of Portland's urban professionals attempting to stare me out of slowly savoring my tumbler of tomato-vodka goodness. The coffee refills, brought by an eager, overly cute waiter were fantastic, but you can only ask for so many refills before you have to admit to yourself, and cute barely-legal Jeff, that you are, in fact, not going to order anything else and you promise to promptly vacate the table for the Joneses standing in the doorway, glaring at us. And, Milo's, I can't afford you. Si quieres azul celeste, que te cueste ('if you desire the blue heavens, it comes with a price tag'), so the saying goes.

I will, however, bring my mom over to meet you. Maybe she'll treat, and after, she can forever voice loosely disguised directives like "honey, Milo's seems like such a nice place. I like that place. Why don't you just go there for bloodys instead of wasting your time on places where the waitresses have more tattoos than your brother and the rest of the patrons are drinking PBR at 9am in the morning?". And I will tell her she has a point, but you can't force attraction. If the chemistry isn't there, it just isn't there. It was a great one-morning stand, though.

Thanks, Milo's.

(Image by how_long_it_takes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/4496229319/)

Scenes from the Space Room

"This tastes watered down.. it also burns!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we discovered the heaviest pour in Portland's bloody mary coterie. Though as much as I love to wake up to three shots of vodka and can appreciate such bold additions to the breakfast menu pantheon as "Taco Omelette" (I ate this), I was super-bummed by the lack of vegetable decoration in our drinks. A celery stalk and a piece of lime.

When Nancy, Christina (henceforth Nancetina) & I got into this little experiment we knew we couldn't go around comparing every bloody mary to the one that broke our hearts. It's not fair to new bloodys nor is it healthy for us. Still, my thoughts linger on the veritable salad appetizer we had come to expect with our morning cocktails. A pepperoncini, a pearl onion and a disgusting olive to share. Oh fired Katie O'Brien's waitress, I wonder if you feel how much you are missed?

No, instead we must focus on the Space Room's own quirks, pleasures and comforts. The decoupaged Star Trek-themed tables, the varied and easy-going clientele reflecting a place that makes all feel welcome and perhaps, my personal favorite.. a location that allows for maximum people watching. Situated in upper/outer (I still don't understand how distance is measured in Portland) of the increasingly gentrified Hawthorne district, the Space Room allows for endless "is that dude gay?" postulation.

Male sexuality and the expression therein, being kind of a moving target in this modern age but especially in the Rose City -- where gay dudes have bushy beards and straight dudes wear skinny jeans. Most folks will find that traditional markers relied upon for accurate gaydar are skewed and confused here. It's progressive (I guess), but a difficult transition for all of us.

Which is why it brings me great delight to share with you, dear reader, Nancetina's and my final call on a topic of great import to all slightly sauced ladies who brunch. After hours of heated debate (and multiple squeeze bags of Sysco's finest vodka), we have determined that in fact, no, gay dudes do not wear orange t-shirts. You're welcome, America!


Photo courtesy of Nate B.